VOL. IV (XXI) 2009 - Departamentul de Filosofie si Stiinte ale ...

100 “CONSUME OR DIE”: MEDIA, NECROPHOBIA AND HYPERCONSUMERISM
Lipovetsky 29 , as reflecting the feebleness of “homo consumericus,” but also
as his attempt to obliterate the effects of a disease by evading pain as much
as possible, constantly in a consumerist search for a ready-made cure. Dylar
is the perfect medicine for healthy hypochondriacs, which explains why both
Babette and Jack would go to any extent to be able to have it. Thus, they
eventually become responsible for actions that would otherwise seem
unlikely for them. Babette’s conceding to have sex in exchange for Dylar, as
well as Jack’s premeditated shooting of Willie Mink in a remote motel room
reminds more of the actions of a couple of illegal drug addicts than of those
of a committed mother and a university professor, as Jack describes both.
DeLillo’s turn toward a drug-driven conflict seems to suggest the hidden
magnitude of the contemporary consumers’ addiction to happiness and
health, as well as the frailty of their seemingly well-established lives from this
perspective.
The scene in which, while anxiously searching for the bottle of Dylar,
Jack goes through the family’s garbage is particularly relevant for a
discussion about the downside that comes from the “fullness of being”
generated by consumerism. A downside that reminds of the illusory nature of
the sense of security insured by “stuffed supermarket bags”, thus confirming
how consumption “offers no real protection to anyone”. 30 Not even to
Dimitrios Cotsakis, a lector candidate for the Elvis-studies department at
College-on-the-Hill, an “enormous man” who nevertheless gets “lots without
trace” in Malibu, or to Heinrich’s friend Orest Mercator, a “big” boy who trains
persistently to sit in a cage full of poisonous snakes, but is bitten in the first
four minutes there. Being a man of “substantial height, big hands, big feet”
cannot annihilate the seriousness of Jack’s exposure to toxic gas—although
it only lasted two and a half minutes.
This contradiction between having a capacity for heavy consumption
and yet being vulnerable can be analyzed along the lines of Lipovetsky’s
“paradoxical happiness,” resulting from the coexistence of personal
fulfillment and angst. The antithetical association can be read in the scene
where Jack, while inspecting a pile of garbage produced by his family,
acknowledges “the dark underside of consumer consciousness,” the
generally invisible result of countless trips to the supermarket 31 . Faced with
the full stench of the garbage bags, “the horrible clotted mass of hair, soap,
ear swabs, crushed roaches, flip-top rings, sterile pads smeared with pus
and bacon fat, strands of frayed dental floss, fragments of ballpoint refills,
toothpicks still displaying bits of impaled food,” he cannot help but feel
disconnected from it, and wonder whether all this filthy “shapeless mass” can
actually be the result of the gratifying shopping sprees his family have been
29 Lipovetsky, 2007, p. 253 (My translation).
30 Stacey Olster, “White Noise” in J. Duvall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Don
DeLillo, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2008, p. 88.
31 DeLillo, 1986, p. 117.